I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m doing here.<\/em><\/p>\n The Orpheus myth isn\u2019t one I\u2019ve spent much time thinking about. I started by trying to think about that. Some myths I think about a good deal. Why not this one? I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s not because I don\u2019t like thinking about it.<\/p>\n I think I don\u2019t like it for two reasons. Firstly, the story offends me. Orpheus offends me. He lets the poor girl down so catastrophically. And brutally: at the very moment that her freedom \u2013 in all the gloriousness of the idea\u2013 seems certain. Imagine. It\u2019s unimaginable. The glimmer of reprieve: light, love, normality. The planes of the back and shoulders, moving, just perceptible; the familiar gait. Possibility turning into reality. But not. End of. Literally.<\/p>\n No way out. No way beyond. Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sorry if that sounds reductive but I think it\u2019s pertinent, for me, for this. I couldn\u2019t find another way into a terrain from which the rest of my own professional story seems so absent.<\/p>\n And I didn\u2019t think Blanchot, to be honest, would help much. I\u2019ve not read him before; I can\u2019t say I enjoyed it. I think I dislike the way he turns Eurydice into a tool of logic, a means to an end; refuses her independent agency. As rhetorical topos, she is diminished: flattened out into a platform to perform on, a space to fill, show off in. But Blanchot\u2019s most shocking abuse of Eurydice occurs for me in his meandering, paradoxical, beastly justifying of her fate as both virtuously productive (sacrifice) and<\/em> ruinous (crime). For Blanchot, \u2018Inspiration means the ruin of Orpheus and the certainty of his ruin \u2026 The work is just as much compromised by inspiration as Orpheus is threatened by it. In that instant it reaches its extreme point of uncertainty.\u2019<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure how far I agree with these remarks; I cite them because I think I can make use of them. Because they suggest another reason why I haven\u2019t thought much about this myth.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know anything about inspiration. I don\u2019t much want to know about inspiration. It\u2019s not something I\u2019m in the habit of thinking about; I don\u2019t expect to have to. But I can say I know a bit about uncertainty. And I like thinking about ruin.<\/p>\n As reader, critic and teacher, I think certainty is perhaps the greatest peril of my job. How can I know anything, certainly<\/em>, about anything? What would be the point? For Blanchot, orphic inspiration seems at some level ruinous. And here, at last, he offers me an idea with which I might be able to agree. For doesn\u2019t inspiration adumbrate a degree of certainty? The pact struck between author and source in the name of inspiration annexes the creative act; at best it threatens, by displacing, the collaborative agency in which reader and writer share; at worst it drains language (and in the poem, the language of form) of what should be its inexhaustible provisionalities.<\/p>\n And yet isn\u2019t poetry sturdier than the mythopoeic genealogy in which we seem to be seeking to embed it? Isn\u2019t poetic language rarified by, because of, the material and\/or aesthetic circumstances in which it is deployed: in the meshing contexts of its (vocal or textual) production and reception? Don\u2019t poems speak as eloquently in their formal as linguistic behaviours, in and through the constraints exerted by and on those behaviours? Aren\u2019t they, like maps and pictures, defined by their spatial limits; by their borders; by what they leave out, deny; by (as Christopher Ricks notes), not always going to the end of the line? (You should know that I like to think that I don\u2019t normally do rhetoric either.)<\/p>\n I\u2019m with those for whom, in all its constructedness, the poem is manifestly fragmentary; for whom it can never be but vestigial. For whom it is, seductively<\/em>, ruin. The aporiae which inhere in the poetic construct constitute, and invite me into, the only kind of intellectual space I want to occupy in, write out of. To heck with Orpheus and his wretched singlemindedness; the silence to which it condemns Eurydice. And me. Let me position myself, self-exposingly and self-protectively, in the uncertain creative energies of the hermeneutic act, among the shifting interstices of the text\u2019s self-fracturing languages and forms; the socio-historical, cultural and political circumstances of its production and reception; the always proliferating uncertainties of its aesthetic life. I don\u2019t want to be anywhere else.<\/p>\n Does the shade of Eurydice play more rebarbatively and more freely in the \u2018melodious, entrancing\u2019 legacy (ruins) of the poem than I\u2019d guessed? Is that the point of the myth? That I can remake it as I choose, if I choose? Is this what Blanchot was saying? (Trying to say.) I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m doing here.<\/em><\/p>\n Dr Alice Entwistle is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glamorgan. She is author of In These Stones: Women writing poetry in and out of contemporary Wales<\/em> (Seren, 2013) and co-author (with Jane Dowson) of A History of Twentieth Century British Women\u2019s Poetry<\/em> (Cambridge UP, 2005). She is co-founder, with her colleagues\u00a0Philip Gross and Kevin Mills, of the creative-critical research grouping Border\/Lines. ‘I’m not sure what …’ was written for ‘Orpheus at Glasfryn’, a day-long colloquium jointly held by Border\/Lines and\u00a0Glasfryn Seminars\u00a0in November 2010, specifically in response to a paper on the essay The Gaze of Orpheus<\/em>, by Maurice Blanchot *<\/span><\/p>\n *Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays<\/em> ed. P. Adams Sitney; trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press 1981), p. 99 – 104<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written For the Border\/Lines ‘Orpheus at Glasfryn’ Event, 2oth November 2010 I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m doing here. The Orpheus myth isn\u2019t one I\u2019ve spent much time thinking about. I started by trying to think about that. Some myths I think about a good deal. Why not this one? I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[29,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/issue-2-logo5.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-m5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}